news-record.com

One group of high school students will head to Raleigh this week to flex their technological muscles.

Grimsley High School’s Team Prion will compete in the regional FIRST Robotics Competition.

“This has been about experiencing the whole engineering process,” team founder David Pudlo said.

Pudlo and 24 teammates have been working on all the various parts of their robots for weeks in an effort to best competitors from high schools from across the state in a game designed for the robots.

Though it is fun to win and place in the competition, the majority of the enjoyment comes from encouraging other competitors and learning new things, Pudlo said.

“We all get excited about the engineering and technology of it all,” he said.

This will be the team’s second and final competition this year. Team Prion usually spends the fall semester building smaller robots for the first competition and teaching the younger team members how to work with the equipment and build models.

“In the spring, we work with the bigger robots and get ready for the competitions,” Pudlo said.

This week, the team will be showing its larger robot — nearly five feet tall. The team had six weeks to build and ship it to Raleigh for competition.

Team members have spent the days since Feb. 23 working on smaller robots that will deploy from the larger one to race up a pole to finish the game.

The team will compete at the Dorton Arena in Raleigh Thursday through Saturday.

Contact Tiffany S. Jones at 373-7157 or tiffany. jones@news-record.com